"Parliament reached its decision after much deliberation. This led to a vote in parliament where the legislation was approved. Several days later, the legislation was authorised by president Fuad Masum", confirmed an official from presidents' office.

Beneath legislation Nº 202 Palestinians in Iraq were granted free education, access to healthcare, employment opportunities, bank services, free housing and were exempt from tax payments, in addition to rights enjoyed by Iraqi citizens. Despite not holding Iraqi citizenship, Palestinians had the right to obtain travel documents in order to freely travel outside and inside of Iraq.

These privileges will all be reversed under the new legislation. Palestinians, no longer regarded as equals, will be treated as foreigners inside a country they have called home for decades.

The president's legal office confirmed that the legislation approved (Nº 76) was intended to annul the preceding legislation (Nº 202) issued back in 2001, by Iraq's former Revolutionary Command Council in 2001, two years before America's invasion toppled Saddam Hussein.

The law opens up what many observers describe the 'protection gap' that has entrapped various strands of Iraq's society who since 2003 have been singled out by new political entities as 'foreigners'.

The latest legislation codifies this perception and any corresponding behaviour. Al Araby al Jadeed reported that once the news is made public, the legislation will come into force.

Thousands will be affected, despite the steady migration of Palestinians seeking a safer living environment than that which Iraq offers today. The ruling places generations of Palestinians in Iraq under serious under attack by depriving them of basic rights.

A senior official with ties to the president's office told Al-Araby Al-Jadeed that legislation 202 was issued as part of a wider package of laws dealing with the status of non-Iraqi residents as issued during the reign of former President Saddam Hussein. The senior official whose name al Araby al Jadeed kept undisclosed, admitted that the new law is “inhumane for Palestinians".

"Women and children" will be the hardest hit, a member of the Palestine Association of Iraq told Al Araby al Jadeed. "From now on, they have to pay for the same services they have enjoyed”.

“The Palestinian community in Iraq has become the poorest Palestinian community in the world, since Iraq fell under US occupation in 2003". The unnamed source added that the Palestinian ambassador in Baghdad, Ahmed al-Aql had not received any prior warning regarding the new law or the surrounding motives.

The number of the Palestinians in Iraq has declined significantly since the US-led invasion 14 years ago. Hundreds became direct targets of violence by for US forces, who arrested, maimed and killed dozens of Palestinians.

Since 2006, Palestinians have suffered the same fate only under new perpetrators, Iran-allied militias that include Badr Corps, Mahdi army and Asa'in ahl al Haq. Their assassination and displacement campaigns against Palestinians are well documented as human rights reports commissioned by various agencies live to tell.

The overall number of the Palestinians living in Iraq has dwindled to several thousands.

Most of the Palestinians in Iraq are originally descended from the villages Ajzam, Jabaa and Ein Ghazal of the occupied Palestinian city of Haifa. Hundreds of them who came from Jaffa, Nablus, Jerusalem and Haifa settled in Iraqi cities of Baghdad, Basra, Mosul and Fallujah, the latter was the first to host them. They moved to Iraq in 1948, many relocating from Jordan.

Today they live in very poor conditions, receiving very little help from the Iraqi government or the international community and face a variety of hardships that ensure the community subsists below the poverty line.

BAGHDAD — The United Nations has called for calm and restraint in Iraq’s self-ruled Kurdish region after security forces killed and wounded number of demonstrators protesting the delay in their salaries, poor services and rampant corruption.

Wednesday’s statement by the U.N. Assistance Mission for Iraq, known as UNAMI, says Kurdish security forces “are urged to exercise maximum restraint in dealing with the demonstrators.”

It also called on the demonstrators to avoid any act of violence, including the destruction of public and private properties.​The mayor of the town of Rania, Hiwa Qarani, told The Associated Press on Wednesday that at least two civilians were killed and 80 wounded the day before. Qarani says an investigation will be launched into the incident.

Iraqi Kurdish protesters shout slogans in Sulaymaniyah on December 19.

At least six people were killed and more than 70 injured Tuesday as anti-government protests erupted for a second straight day, said a provincial health director in Iraq's semi-autonomous Kurdish region.

Five people died during demonstrations over unpaid civil servant salaries and rising tensions with Baghdad in the Kurdish city of Rania in Sulaymaniyah province, according to Miran Mohammad, the provincial health director.

​Another person died while undergoing treatment at a hospital, said a security source who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he's not authorized to speak to the media.

Iraqi Kurds have built a semi-autonomous region in northern Iraq with their own regional government, the Kurdistan Regional Government, or KRG, their own armed forces and an oil-dependent economy.

MOSUL, Iraq (AP) — The price Mosul’s residents paid in blood to see their city freed was between 9,000 and 11,000 dead, a civilian casualty rate nearly 10 times higher than what has been previously reported.

The number killed in the 9-month battle to liberate the city from the Islamic State marauders has not been acknowledged by the U.S.-led coalition, the Iraqi government or the self-styled caliphate.

But Mosul’s gravediggers, its morgue workers and the volunteers who retrieve bodies from the city’s rubble are keeping count.

Iraqi or coalition forces are responsible for at least 3,200 civilian deaths from airstrikes, artillery fire or mortar rounds between October 2016 and the fall of the Islamic State group in July 2017, according to an Associated Press investigation that cross-referenced independent databases from non-governmental organizations.

German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel speaks during a session of the Bundestag, German lower house of Parliament in Berlin, Germany, November 21, 2017. REUTERS/Axel Schmidt

BERLIN (Reuters) - Germany wants to continue support for Iraq and the semi-autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government, but that aid depends on peaceful efforts to solve the conflict between the two sides, German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel said on Monday.

The German government has provided more than 1 billion euros in humanitarian, development and stabilization aid to Iraq since 2014, making it one of the biggest international donors.

“Our support is for Iraq as a unified state,” Gabriel told reporters after meeting with KRG Prime Minister Nechirvan Barzan in Berlin. “We want to continue that, but the precondition is that Iraq solves its internal conflicts peacefully and democratically, and that we find a way out of the tense situation we are in now.”

Barzani underscored his region’s determination to work with the central government in Baghdad, and called on Germany to play a bigger role in mediating the conflict.

The amendments would have covered areas including inheritance and divorce, and, by giving powers to impose family laws to certain religious communities, would have allowed girls to be married as young as age 8 under some of these laws. The head of the women’s rights committee in parliament rejected the initiative in mid-November, blocking the bill. However, two leading women’s rights organizations say that some parliament members have threatened to continue to push for the amendments to secure votes in some parts of the country in the May 2018 parliamentary elections.

“Parliament’s women’s rights committee has made a great contribution to Iraqi society in rejecting this effort to scuttle Iraq’s family law protections,” said Belkis Wille, senior Iraq researcher at Human Rights Watch. “Threats by lawmakers to dismantle protections under the current law and restore discriminatory laws would be devastating to women’s rights.”

Parliament members from several Shia Islamic parties, spearheaded by the Fadhila Party, to which the justice minister belongs, proposed the amendments on November 1. The proposed amendments would enshrine Shia and Sunni religious establishment control over marriage-related matters and require courts to make exceptions to existing legal protections.

GENEVA (Reuters) - The United Nations human rights office is “appalled” at the hanging of 38 prisoners in Iraq, a U.N. spokeswoman said on Friday, a day after the executions at a prison in the southern Iraqi city of Nassiriya.

“We are deeply shocked and appalled at the mass execution,” the spokeswoman, Liz Throssell, told a regular U.N. briefing in Geneva, adding that the human rights office had “huge concerns” about Iraq’s use of the death penalty and - not for the first time - urged the government to halt all executions.

“Given the flaws of the Iraqi justice system, it also appears extremely doubtful that strict due process and fair trial guarantees were followed in these 38 cases. This raises the prospect of irreversible miscarriages of justice and violations of the right to life.”​The 38 male prisoners were convicted by Iraq’s judiciary for terrorism-related crimes, she said. She did not have information on their ages or nationalities.

Iraq’s armed forces as watched by thousands of electronic communities across the globe no longer represent a highly equipped, centralized national force.

Today its consists of a loose but wide-spanning network of militia clusters — an exclusive fraternity — blessed by Iraq’s highest ranking clerics, and Tehran’s ruling religious authority. The multiplication of militia units though not unprecedented, has consequently reached a new extremity.

The year 2003 marks the phase in which militias were first mobilized. Years later many bands were resurrected and rebranded ‘Iraq’s Popular Mobilization forces’ (PMF), in direct response to the Islamic State group’s unlawful conquest of northwestern planes in June 2014.

The same forces presently roam the state of Iraq within a legal and political capacity, a Shia Islamic fighting corps, locally referred to as A’Hashd A Shaabi.

In the summer of 1948, many Palestinian refugees moved to Baghdad, especially, from Ajzam, Jabaa and Ein Ghazal villages in the occupied city of Haifa. They left Palestine after a legendary resistance in the face of the Israeli occupation forces.

The Palestinians from these three villages constituted the majority of Palestinian refugees in Iraq. Additionally, tens of Palestinian families from Jaffa, Nablus, Jerusalem and Haifa settled down in Baghdad, Basra, Mosul and Fallujah whose people launched a campaign called "People of land, not guests" to accommodate the Palestinians entering Iraq through Jordan and Syria using wooden buses.

The estimated number of the Palestinians who arrived in Iraq was about five thousand; most of them were women and children. The Iraqi authorities moved some of them to other areas, and the Iraqi military took the responsibility of supporting them financially and helping with their accommodation using its own annual budget until the end of 1950. The Iraqi authorities then transferred the file of the Palestinian refugees from the Ministry of Defense to the Ministry of Social Affairs.

The successive Iraqi governments granted them the right to free education, health services and work in the country, and all other rights of Iraqi citizens, except owning properties and gaining Iraqi citizenship. They were also exempted from conscription into the armed forces.

An Iranian child soldier in the early years of the Iran-Iraq war. Source unknown.

Challenging populist accounts that mistrace the start date of the Iraq-Iran war

We are in a period of history where we have access to more information than ever before and all instantaneously at the click of a button. Despite this, the magnitude of so called ‘fake news’ has reached fever pitch, with many calling the integrity of journalists, responsible for disseminating political information, into question.

Within the special position they occupy, journalists are bound by professional norms which in the last decade of coverage on Iraq have been tailored in ways that reflects the geopolitical preferences of regional and international powers.

On September 22 1980, following a military operation led by Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s army, 10 airfields across Iran were bombed by Iraqi jets. A quick google search tells us this was how the eight-year war began.

Trawling through archives, the reality one begins to uncover is far from this simple.